To avoid another crash, the Massachusetts senator says the U.S. must "force law-breaking bankers to trade in their pinstripe suits for orange jumpsuits."

With Saturday marking the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared Thursday night that the only way to avoid another crisis is to break up the Wall Street banks that caused it and hold wealthy executives accountable for their crimes.

"Oh, yeah. Give me a chance," Warren said when asked by Andrew Sorkin of the New York Times if she still supports breaking up big banks, many of which are far larger than they were before the 2008 crash.

"We have got to change the rules," Warren declared, highlighting her effort to implement a 21st century Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial and investment banking. "This Congress rolling back regulations on the biggest financial institutions, rolling back regulations on Wall Street, this is absolutely the wrong direction for us to go."

In addition to pushing for stronger safeguards against big bank speculation, Warren also argued in a tweet on Thursday that "we need to start holding Wall Street executives accountable" if we are to avoid another crash.

Warren's warning about the vulnerability of the American financial system and renewed call to break up the big banks were echoed by progressive commentators, lawmakers, and journalists ahead of the official tenth anniversary of the crisis—which, for most Americans, never actually ended.

As Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi noted in a crisis retrospective on Thursday, the overwhelmingly "poor, nonwhite, and elderly" victims of the crash have been neglected by much of the corporate press in favor of heroic-sounding narratives of bankers teaming up with regulators to save the financial system from total catastrophe.

"Persistent propaganda about what happened 10 years ago not only continues to warp news coverage, but contributed to a wide array of political consequences, including the election of Donald Trump," Taibbi argued. "One of the main things the financial press missed in its countless crash post-mortems is that the subprime scam was significantly about race. In its particulars, it was really just a rehash of ancient race crimes like 'contract selling,' a predatory white-on-black home loan scam from the Jim Crow days."

These scams ultimately had a disastrous impact on black families in the U.S., which lost an astonishing 50 percent of their overall wealth when the system came crashing down.

As The Week's Ryan Cooper has argued, the meltdown was made worse by the fact that the Obama administration—which was stuffed with ex-bankers—deliberately chose to prioritize bailing out Wall Street over assisting homeowners who were devastated by the foreclosure crisis that continues in the present.

Thanks to the Obama administration's bailouts and the Trump administration's massive gifts to Wall Street in the form of tax cuts and deregulation, America's five biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs—have raked in more than $583 billion in combined profits since the crisis, according to a new analysis by Public Citizen published this week.

In an op-ed for USA Today on Friday, Morris Pearl—former managing director of the financial firm BlackRock Investments and now chair of the Patriotic Millionaires—argued that by allowing Wall Street firms to continue to expand and engage in risky betting, the Trump administration is actively heightening the risk of another major crisis.

"In an effort to inflate profits for big banks, the Trump administration and Congress are setting us up for another crash," Pearl concluded. "Without adequate regulation, there's no world in which bankers voluntarily refrain from taking reckless bets again and again, until we're right back where we were 10 years ago."

"The bank lobbyists have been hitting Capitol Hill hard, and they have a Dodd-Frank rollback bill lined up with the support of every Republican and 12 Democrats."

Americans are calling urgently for solutions to two major crises confronting the U.S.—gun violence and expiring DACA permits, which will leave thousands of young immigrants vulnerable to deportation. But instead of heeding these demands, Senate Republicans and a dozen Democrats are teaming up this week to push through legislation that would further enrich Wall Street and heighten the risk of another financial crash.

"The national conversation at the moment is rightly focused on gun safety, but the Senate is taking up a totally unrelated bill to deregulate big banks," Chad Bolt, senior policy manager at Indivisible, said in an interview with Buzzfeed on Sunday. "It's totally out of touch."

A look beyond the measure's "Orwellian" name and at its actual content reveals that supporters' "community bank" talking points are little more than an attempt to mask the bill's enormous gifts to large institutions.

What Senate banking bill IS:Deregulation of 25/38 of the biggest banks, new bank freedom to racially discriminate.

As The Intercept's David Dayen reported last Friday, Crapo's legislation—which is set to hit the Senate floor for a procedural vote on Tuesday—has been used by lobbyists as a vehicle to ram through changes to Wall Street regulations that will allow them to "ramp up risk" and further boost their bottom lines.

"A bill that began as a well-intentioned effort to satisfy some perhaps legitimate community bank grievances has instead mushroomed, sparking fears that Washington is paving the way for the next financial meltdown," Dayen noted. "Aside from the gifts to Citigroup and other big banks, the bill undermines fair lending rules that work to counter racial discrimination and rolls back regulation and oversight on large regional banks."

Meanwhile, progressive Democrats in Congress have also fiercely denounced the bill as a giveaway to the very same banks whose fraudulent activity sparked the devastating 2008 financial crash.

"The public is not asking for bank deregulation," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in an interviewwith the Washington Post on Sunday. "This is not a community bank bill. They say it is. It's like the tax cuts weren't a middle-class tax bill; they want to say it is. This is a bill that helps some of the largest banks."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been voicing her opposition to the deregulation bill since it was introduced last year, argued in a recent email to supporters that the deregulatory push is clear evidence that lobbyists dictate policy change in Washington.

"The bank lobbyists have been hitting Capitol Hill hard, and they have a Dodd-Frank rollback bill lined up with the support of every Republican and 12 Democrats," Warren wrote. "We need to make some noise about this big wet kiss to the big banks by reminding senators as loudly as possible: they work for the American people, not for big bank lobbyists."

Ahead of a vote on Crapo's legislation—which appears likely to pass, thanks to Democratic support—commercial banks have been dumping contributions into the coffers of senators backing the measure.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), and Jon Tester (D-Mont.)—all of whom are co-sponsoring Crapo's bill—are the top three recipients of commerical bank cash this election cycle.

In what environmental justice groups are characterizing as legal harassment by "corporate mercenaries," the company that owns the contested Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has filed a lawsuit against Greenpeace, Earth First!, BankTrack, and individuals who oppposed and protested the pipeline, claiming over $300 million in damages.

Greenpeace general counsel Tom Wetterer said the "meritless lawsuit" is "not designed to seek justice, but to silence free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation."

DAPL developer Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) in a 187-page complaint (pdf), claims the groups "employ patterns of criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation to target legitimate companies and industries with fabricated environmental claims and other purported misconduct, inflicting billions of dollars in damage."

Kasowitz law firm, which is representing ETP, filed another lawsuit against Greenpeace last year, and is also reportedlyrepresenting President Donald Trump in the ongoing federal investigation into allegations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

"This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies, with Trump's attorneys leading the way," Wetterer said. "They are apparently trying to market themselves as corporate mercenaries willing to abuse the legal system to silence legitimate advocacy work."

Seeking nearly $1 billion in damages, ETP accuses the environmentalists of defamation, illegal business interference, and violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a federal law often used to target mobsters and that, according to the Justice Department, "was passed by Congress with the declared purpose of seeking to eradicate organized crime in the United States."

The complaint claims Greenpeace launches "fraudulent, slanderous" campaigns "based upon fabricated evidence and witness accounts," to "generate maximum publicity and donations, irrespective of the environmental merit," purporting that "raising money and the network's profile is the primary objective, not saving the environment."

It also claims the environmental organizations—which it calls"militant eco-terrorist groups"—"knowingly funded, controlled, directed, and incited acts of terrorism," and "used this manufactured crisis to relentlessly campaign against DAPL based on a series of demonstrably false lies and illegal activity designed to publicize those lies." ETP claims their financial losses were the result of the environmentalists "targetting [ETP's] banks, investors, research analysts, and other critical business constituents."

"These damages," the complaint concludes, "were intentionally and maliciously inflicted based upon a relentless campaign of lies and outright mob thuggery. Defendants must be held accountable for these damages."

BankTrack called the allegations "outrageous" and, echoing Greenpeace, said in a statementthat the lawsuit is an attempt "to silence civil society organizations, and to curb their crucial role in helping to foster business conduct globally that protects the environment, recognizes the rights and interests of all stakeholders, and respects human rights."

The statement also said:

We consider it perfectly within our right and our stated mission to inform the general public on potential or actual negative social, environmental, and human rights impacts of projects to be financed by private sector banks. We also consider it competely within our right to bring information on such projects, including indicators of widespread public concern, to the attention of banks, so that they can make their own assessment of the materiality of this information, and let this weigh into their own decision making processes.

Despite several months of protests by indigenous people and environmentalists from international nonprofit groups like Greenpeace, the pipeline became fully operational and began transporting oil from North Dakota to Illinois June 1. Two weeks later, the environmentalists—who call themselves water protectors—celebrated when a federal judge ordered ETP and the Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider their analysis of environmental risks posed by the pipeline. The ruling, however, did not stop the flow of oil. Four Sioux tribes and DAPL opponents are still fighting in federal court in order to shut it down.

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By now you've hopefully heard the incredible news -- Governor Brown signed SB 1107 to repeal California's ban on public financing of campaigns! A huge thank you to all of you who helped!

This caps off easily the hardest fought and most important campaign finance victory in California in the 14+ years the California Clean Money Campaign has been working on the issue with our allies.

Two separate initiatives, in 2006 and 2010, tried to overturn the ban and fell short. We always figured an initiative was our only option, because the legislative route requires 2/3 votes and no Republican legislator in CA in memory has ever voted for public financing. So that we were all able to get it done by getting five Republicans to vote for it still amazes me.

CCMC joined California Common Cause as sponsors of SB 1107, but this was a tremendous coalition and grassroots victory with 40 state and national organizations involved. We tallied up the activist actions that were taken to convince Governor Brown:

-- More than 34,000 people signed petitions emailing Governor Brown

-- At least 3,000 people made official comments on his website

-- At least 1,650 people made phone calls to Governor Brown's office (and probably over 2,000)

-- 257 separate tweets from different people @JerryBrownGov with 171 @ his chief of staff

-- Delivered a stack of 56,854 total California petition signers

I'm pretty sure that's the most contacts that Governor Brown has ever gotten on any bill since he's been in office, probably by far. And that's not counting op-eds, high-level contacts by national leaders, etc.

Many many thanks to all of you who worked to help us get this into law! Organizations that joined CCMC and Common Cause in actively working to pass SB 1107 included California Church Impact, California Labor Federation, California League of Conservation Voters, California School Employees Association, CALPIRG, CARA, Courage Campaign, CREDO, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Every Voice, Friends of the Earth, GMO Free USA, League of Women Voters of California, Money Out Voters In, People Demanding Action, People For the American Way, Progressive Democrats of America, Sierra Club California, Represent.US, and Voices for Progress.

I'd like to especially call out CLCV, Courage Campaign, CREDO, Daily Kos, Friends of the Earth, LWV, and PDA for their multiple online actions over the last couple of months that helped give us the online oomph needed to get SB 1107's bipartisan super-majority votes and Governor Brown's signature. Thank you, friends!

I'll also mention that SB 1107 author Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), chair of the the Senate Elections Committee and author of multiple electoral reform bills, is one of the best legislative champions for multiple campaign finance reform measures that California has ever had. I predict that more big things will come from working with him and other champions like Assemblymember Jimmy Gomez, Senator Bob Hertzberg, and a couple of our new Republican friends.

If you can share our post of the victory on Facebook (fireworks included!), that would helpful, because the posts asks people to sign our special petition thanking Governor Brown for signing SB 1107 (as well as SB 1349 to modernize CA's online disclosure system that he also signed):

There's plenty of work yet to be done in California, of course, including defending SB 1107 against likely court challenges and actually PASSING public financing systems now that the ban has been repealed -- not to mention other things like getting Prop 59, the Overturn Citizens United Act passed this November and finally passing the California DISCLOSE Act. But this was a crucial and heartening victory, and thanks again to everybody who helped make it happen!

Governor Brown signs SB 1107 to legalize citizens-funded elections!

Inbox

x

Trent Lange

2:49 PM (3 hours ago)

to CA

Hello California DISCLOSE and public financing coalition partners --

By now you've hopefully heard the incredible news -- Governor Brown signed SB 1107 to repeal California's ban on public financing of campaigns! A huge thank you to all of you who helped!

This caps off easily the hardest fought and most important campaign finance victory in California in the 14+ years the California Clean Money Campaign has been working on the issue with our allies.

Two separate initiatives, in 2006 and 2010, tried to overturn the ban and fell short. We always figured an initiative was our only option, because the legislative route requires 2/3 votes and no Republican legislator in CA in memory has ever voted for public financing. So that we were all able to get it done by getting five Republicans to vote for it still amazes me.

CCMC joined California Common Cause as sponsors of SB 1107, but this was a tremendous coalition and grassroots victory with 40 state and national organizations involved. We tallied up the activist actions that were taken to convince Governor Brown:

-- More than 34,000 people signed petitions emailing Governor Brown

-- At least 3,000 people made official comments on his website

-- At least 1,650 people made phone calls to Governor Brown's office (and probably over 2,000)

-- 257 separate tweets from different people @JerryBrownGov with 171 @ his chief of staff

-- Delivered a stack of 56,854 total California petition signers

I'm pretty sure that's the most contacts that Governor Brown has ever gotten on any bill since he's been in office, probably by far. And that's not counting op-eds, high-level contacts by national leaders, etc.

Many many thanks to all of you who worked to help us get this into law! Organizations that joined CCMC and Common Cause in actively working to pass SB 1107 included California Church Impact, California Labor Federation, California League of Conservation Voters, California School Employees Association, CALPIRG, CARA, Courage Campaign, CREDO, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Every Voice, Friends of the Earth, GMO Free USA, League of Women Voters of California, Money Out Voters In, People Demanding Action, People For the American Way, Progressive Democrats of America, Sierra Club California, Represent.US, and Voices for Progress.

I'd like to especially call out CLCV, Courage Campaign, CREDO, Daily Kos, Friends of the Earth, LWV, and PDA for their multiple online actions over the last couple of months that helped give us the online oomph needed to get SB 1107's bipartisan super-majority votes and Governor Brown's signature. Thank you, friends!

I'll also mention that SB 1107 author Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), chair of the the Senate Elections Committee and author of multiple electoral reform bills, is one of the best legislative champions for multiple campaign finance reform measures that California has ever had. I predict that more big things will come from working with him and other champions like Assemblymember Jimmy Gomez, Senator Bob Hertzberg, and a couple of our new Republican friends.

If you can share our post of the victory on Facebook (fireworks included!), that would helpful, because the posts asks people to sign our special petition thanking Governor Brown for signing SB 1107 (as well as SB 1349 to modernize CA's online disclosure system that he also signed):

There's plenty of work yet to be done in California, of course, including defending SB 1107 against likely court challenges and actually PASSING public financing systems now that the ban has been repealed -- not to mention other things like getting Prop 59, the Overturn Citizens United Act passed this November and finally passing the California DISCLOSE Act. But this was a crucial and heartening victory, and thanks again to everybody who helped make it happen!

Onwards!

- Trent

WAYNE WILLIAMS

Well done Trent, Congratulations to everyone for their efforts on all these i...

For Mylan, it was a perfect plan—diabolical, unstoppable. The company made changes in its anti-allergy EpiPen dispenser in 2009, enough to give it patent protection. Then, in 2012, it began to give away free pens to schools, gradually making school nurses at least partly dependent on them.

Meanwhile the company was successfully lobbying for the "Emergency Epinephrine Act," commonly referred to as the "EpiPen Law," which encouraged the presence of epinephrine dispensers in schools. Most recently, after raising the price from $100 to $600, Mylan announced a half-price coupon, making itself appear generous even though the price had effectively jumped from $100 to $300.

This is capitalism at its worst, a greedy and disdainful profit-over-people system that leaves millions of Americans sick... or dead. These are the sins of the pharmaceutical industry.

1. Gouging Customers

The Mylan story is just one of many. An American with cancer will face bills up to $183,000 per year, even though it hasn't been established that the expensive treatments actually extend lives. A 12-week course of Sovaldi, for hepatitis, costs Gilead Sciences about $84 and is priced at $84,000.

This is an industry that can suddenly impose a 60,000% increase on desperately ill people. Yet the pharmaceutical industry's profit margin is matched only by the unscrupulous financial industry for the highest corporate profit margin.

2. Disposing of People Who Can't Afford Medication

A Forbes writer summarizes: "Somewhere, right now, a cash-strapped parent or budget-limited patient with a severe allergy will skip acquiring an EpiPen. And someday, they will need it in a life-threatening situation...and they won’t have it. And they will die."

A recent Health Affairs study concluded that since 2004 our medical dollars have been "increasingly concentrated on the wealthy." As a result the richest 1% of American males live nearly 15 years longer than the poorest 1% (10 years for women). The high cost of medication is one of the factors leading to early death.

3. Gouging Us a Second Time

We're paying twice for outrageously overpriced medications, both directly and with our tax dollars. The average medical insurance deductible has increased 67 percent since 2010, and most Medicare patients still face out-of-pocket costs of $7,000 or more a year.

Over $5 billion of our tax dollars was spent by Medicare and Medicaid in 2014 on just two drugs (Sovaldi and Harvoni). Pharmaceutical lobbyists have rigged the system to prevent Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices.

Not satisfied with Medicare-related abuses, Purdue Pharmaceuticals began targeting troubled post-9/11 veterans with expensive and addicting opioid medications, and within ten years a third of the Army’s soldiers were hooked on prescription drugs.

4. Stealing Our Research

The pharmaceutical industry receives most of its basic research funding from the taxpayers, and 75 percent of the most innovative drugs were initially funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Dean Baker notes that the U.S. is unique in giving drug companies patent monopolies on drugs that are essential for people’s health and lives. An example is genetically engineered insulin, which due to patent protection cannot be made generically, and as a result can cost a patient up to $5,000 a year, many times more than a patent-expired version. Another example is the anti-parasite drug Daraprim, which has been on the market for 62 years, yet was appropriated by the now-infamous Martin Shkreli and price-hiked from $13.50 to $750.00.

A common excuse for pharmaceutical greed is the cost of research and development. But the industry spends almost $20 on marketing for every dollar spent on R&D. Meanwhile, Big Pharma has cut nearly 150,000 jobs since 2008, mostly in R&D.

5. Cheating on Taxes

Three of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, with over $20 billion in combined profits last year, claimed nearly $9 billion in U.S. losses despite having nearly half their sales in the United States.

Other major drug companies use the notorious inversion procedure to skip out on taxes. AbbVie has done it. Pfizer tried. And Mylan, along with all its other transgressions, ditched the U.S. for the Netherlands, despite having its employees and facilities in West Virginia. Adding a further touch of hypocrisy, Mylan sought U.S. government help when another company tried to buy it out.

Patriotism is a beautiful thing to corporations when it protects their profits.

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'This is really a resounding victory for everyone who cares about protecting not only our water supply, but water supplies around the world'

Voters in one Oregon county on Tuesday approved a ban on commercial bottled water production, stopping a years-long effort by Swiss transnational Nestle to sell over 100 million gallons of water a year from the Columbia River Gorge.

"This is really a resounding victory for everyone who cares about protecting not only our water supply, but water supplies around the world," said Aurora del Val with Local Water Alliance, which filed the ballot measure petition.

Though opponents of the proposed plant in Cascade Locks in Hood River County were vastly outspent, Measure 14-55 easily passed—rougly 69 percent to 31 percent.

According to Julia DeGraw, an organizer for national watchdog organization Food and Water Watch, which helped lead the opposition, voters were very aware of the risks of putting corporate control over the precious resource, despite the purported 50 jobs the plant would provide the job-scarce town. "When you talk to them about something as crucial as their water, which is necessary for an agricultural economy, right after they have a drought, there is not enough misinformation the opposition can throw at voters to make them buy it," she said.

As Hood River business owner Michael Barthmus previously explained, "most people understand that water is a resource and basic human need, and not a commodity to be exploited. Shipping water outside of our county seems like poor stewardship, especially during a time of shortage and droughts. Our families, farms and the fish in our rivers should be our top priority," he added.

Nestlé for seven years has sought a way to bottle water from Oxbow Springs, which gurgles out of hillside just outside the Columbia River Gorge town of Cascade Locks.

The company hopes to build a $50 million bottling plant at the town's port, where 100 million gallons annually of Oxbow Springs water would be bottled under the Arrowhead brand. Additional Cascade Locks municipal water would be sold under the company's Pure Life brand.

politicians did not hold full public hearings, accepted trips from Nestlé to California, and presented negotiations between Nestlé and the state authorities as a done deal that was now out of ordinary people’s hands.

Local Water Alliance is applauding the results as a "landslide victory," as the group had seen the measure's implications beyond Nestle's plan. "Protecting our water supply is not about stopping just one project. It's about setting the precedent that our water and the future of our community are so important and so intertwined that we are not willing to sell them off," the group's website states.

Nestle's attempted water-grab in Hood River County was the subject of a 7-minute doucmentary relased in March by the Story of Stuff Project, Food & Water Watch, and the Local Water Alliance, which you can see below:

The Panama tax haven leaks reveal a lot about the lawlessness of the rich, as well as the ideological bias of the western press.

The worst criminals on earth are not the poor who sit behind bars in jails and prisons. The biggest thieves are found among the rich. The 1% can buy legislation, politicians and the media to carry out and hide their dirty work. If they can’t change the laws to benefit themselves in their homelands they simply send their money elsewhere through shell holding companies. This transfer of wealth, much of it diverted from what ought to be tax payments, is an open secret. Panama, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg and Switzerland are known for securing the money and secrets of the rich and the well connected.

The leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panama based Mossack Fonseca law firm brings into the light of day what was long known but passively accepted. Now the facts are in the open but the way in which the revelations are reported is questionable and taints an important story.

The documents now known as the Panama Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) who then shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ is a non-profit but with its own problematic origins. It is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund. ICIJ then worked with journalists around the world including from the Guardian and the McClatchy newspaper chain. They in turn will decide what will be kept secret and what will be shared with the public. The goal of revealing secrets instead turns into a plan to keep more secrets and to tarnish certain reputations based on bias and mysterious criteria.

The Panama Papers show that the heads of state of Ukraine, Iceland, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all held shell holding company accounts in different tax haven locations. Vladimir Putin’s name appears nowhere but the corporate media used his image repeatedly to drum up interest in what is an otherwise newsworthy story. There are Russians who have used Mossack Fonseca services and three of them have close ties to Putin. Guilt by association and innuendo follow instead of disinterested reporting of pertinent facts.

While the corporate media happily do the work of imperialism, Russia is making good on its promise to kick ISIS out of Syria. The liberation of the ancient Syrian city Palmyra should have garnered Putin as much press attention as the Panama story. But the United States and NATO have still not abandoned their goal of regime change in Syria. They were ready to let ISIS fight Assad and do the job for them. While they pretend to drive ISIS out of Syria the Russians are actually getting the job done. If the corporate media want to cover Putin, that development provides an excellent opportunity for them to do so.

While news outlets ranging from the Guardian to the New York Times do their best to connect Putin to the Mossack Fonseca scandal without evidence, the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the president of Ukraine are directly involved. David Cameron’s late father is among those mentioned in the Mossack Fonseca trove. Simply put, he established an offshore account to hide the family fortune. The goal of the scheme was as simple as it is devious: keep Cameron family money and the prime minister’s inheritance from being taxed.

The president of Ukraine is yet another thief. When Petro Poroshenko came to office after the 2014 anti-Russian coup he promised to cease playing any role in the operations of his confection company. That business made him a wealthy man with an estimated $800 million personal fortune. Instead he opened an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying taxes.

The media already knew that Poroshenko is richer than many of the Russian oligarchs they obsessively cover and they know that Ukraine is a failed state. They know that Ukraine owes Russia $3 billion and they know that the IMF violated its own rules in not making them pay up.

It is a good thing that the corruption of the world’s elites has been revealed. But as Wikileaks points out, all the documents must be released so that there is transparency available to all and an adherence to journalistic standards.

Hopefully, the proof of worldwide corruption will spur protest and opposition to a system which gives the masses nothing except more inequality. The people of Iceland didn’t wait to be told what to do. Thousands took to the streets and forced their prime minister to resign within three days of the story being published.

It is interesting but not at all mysterious that there are no Americans named in the Mossack Fonseca documents. The reason is simple. U.S. law so clearly favors the rich that they have no need to go offshore to form shell corporations. They can do so legally in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada. Rich people everywhere know it too. No need to go to Panama or Switzerland. The U.S. is now the best tax haven on the planet. Hopefully the corporate media will decide to cover that story too.

Time and again, whether we are seeking sensible healthcare, environmental, economic, or foreign policy—supported by a majority of Americans—we hit a barrier, because corporate lobbyists and donors have managed to get between our legislators and us. National and local media is right-wing and true journalism has suffered.

End Corporate Rule is part of the We The People NOT We The Corporations PDA platform. We work on the following issues:

Overturn Citizens United

Protect the Postal Service

Negotiate Prescription Drug Prices Under Medicare Part D

End the Congress Member to Lobbyist Revolving Door

End Corporate Rule Statistics and Facts

15 States and 500 Jurisdictions have called for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United

From 1983 to 2004, due to tax cuts and the defeat of labor unions, distribution of new wealth has gone:

42% to the top 1% of Americans

94% to the top 20% of Americans

6% to the bottom 80% of Americans

If Medicare were allowed to negotiate prescription drug prices with drug companies under Medicare Part D, we would save over half a trillion dollars over 10 years